What can the party leaders do?

It is quite easy to accuse Cameron (and no doubt tomorrow, Clegg) of being spineless and not sacking MP's who appear to have abused the expenses system, however that decision should not be taken so lightly.

The key objective of each of the party leaders has to be to get into (or stay in Gordon's case) power, and then effect change from there.

The difficuties of these decisions is is probably best illustrated with an example.

If one of Dave's backbenchers has a nicely safe seat (even with the expenses issues taken into account), what benefit is there by sacking him/her? They'd have to get someone sharpish to stand in that constituency and put the seat at much greater risk. Which is an own goal given the key objective.
Thus in my view, it is a balance between how much damage has been done to the MP in question versus how safe their seat is versus the general public's opinion over the party's misdemeanours.

A different scenario.

One of the Tory backbenchers has committed a "mild" misdemeanour in the current context of revelations, but his seat is shaky.

Dave could sack him & would get a bit of good PR and the seat was at risk anyway, but the public will look at the misdemeanour's committed by that MP and demand that anyone worse than that must go also. Rightly so, you can't have double standards.

The above scenarios equally apply to Clegg, however Brown's position is somewhat different.

He has to continue to the country and so any action he takes results in a cabinet reshuffle. As the likelihood of Labour managing anything but a very poor result at the elections, is there any point?

There is another way to tackle this which I alluded to yesterday (and does seem to be growing legs amongst the community). MP's of moral substance appear to have already taken this up.

The Pay It Back campaign.

All parties have to do this, and those that don't face severe political disadvantage.

Pay It Back

Conspicuous by their absence in the media - who is the worst?

There are some MP's who are conspicuous by their absence in the Telegraph's revelations.

Some muse that it is because their expenses discretions are already in the public domain, but I'm not so sure.

The libdems are off the hook here (until tomorrow I understand) as they have yet to have their expenses revealed.

So who are the missing miscreants?

My bets for those to be revealed in the Telegraph's crescendo:

Jacqui Smith
James Purnell
Ed Balls
Yvette Cooper

Interestingly all Labour, however that is as much due to their public profiles than anything else.

Expenses - Increase. Sorry, increase? Did I read that correctly?

One of the stories regarding the MP's expenses has been buried by the revelations of what MP's are claiming for.

They have voted for a 17% rise in their expense allowance for this year.

Is inflation sky high ? Nope

Are interest rates punitively high? Nope

So why award yourself what is in effect another £25,000 each worth of expenses?

The cynics say that this will be the last year for many MP's and they want the trough topped up to the brim.

Difficult to argue otherwise with the current state of the economy.

Update: Six pence added to the minimum wage - roughly 1%. You couldn't make it up.